


Return

by letstalkabouttrek



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Lost Love, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3870565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letstalkabouttrek/pseuds/letstalkabouttrek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lenara Kahn looks for the answers to questions she never got to ask. (Originally posted on tumblr.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Return

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this to my tumblr, and since I finally got around to getting an AO3 account I'm transferring some old stuff here. Warning: half of this is me getting creative with alien (specifically Trill) culture and the other is me being sad about Dax/Kahn.

Lenara can tell she’s getting looks. The dark blue veil covering her face is an obscure tradition from a small region of a distant continent; it naturally draws curious stares even here in the capital. But no one dares question her presence, their interest outweighed by the nature of the occasion, and she is allowed to linger in the back, unapproachable and anonymous.

As the hushed whispers wash over her, she lets herself wonder what they would say if they knew.

—

She seats herself in the back, as far away as she can from the distant relatives and old classmates that seem to make up the bulk of the mourners. The front row is occupied by the speakers, the group of individuals who were closest to the dead, who will carry out the ceremony as they tell their stories. Lenara doesn’t recognize any of them, but she can pick out an older couple who must be the parents seated on either side of a crying young woman, probably a sister. The rest she supposes are childhood friends, perhaps with a teacher or mentor added to the mix.

These are the people who will grieve Jadzia, and none of them know who Lenara is.

No one pays her any more attention once the ceremony starts, the father standing up to serve as first speaker. He kneels in front of the open casket and takes what looks to be a small wooden figurine out of his pocket, placing it in the bowl clasped in his daughter’s cold hands – his token to the dead. He talks of a determined, inquisitive, impossibly bright young girl, who knew from the start that what she wanted out of life was to be a scientist and be Joined.

Near the end, he starts to cry, and many others join him. Lenara does not; she never knew the girl of whom he speaks.

The father, whose name Lenara still doesn’t know, is followed by a woman who introduces herself as Jadzia’s childhood best friend. Her token is a beaded bracelet the right size for a child’s wrist. Her story paints the picture of a quiet, studious girl who got lost in books and was always top of her class: the smart, responsible friend who kept the others out of trouble and on the right track. Lenara tries to reconcile that image with the woman in her head, who was willing to throw away everything she’d worked for in a passionate show of defiance, and finds that she can’t.

With each passing story, the pile of tokens grows, as does Lenara’s sense of unease. The day is clear and beautiful, the kind she thinks Jadzia would have loved, but the heat of the sun in the cemetery begins to feel oppressive, each light breeze that blows her veil against her face stifling. She searches the words that fill the air for any hint of the mischievous glint in Jadzia’s eyes, the teasing line of her smile, the confidence and humor that filled her voice, and comes up empty handed. Every tale is full of Jadzia Idaris, the shy but brilliant scientist who achieved the near impossible, but Jadzia Dax is absent. She has already been mourned, on a space station light years away, by the people who knew her.

The final speaker is the mother, a tall, willowy woman whose dark hair is streaked with silver. The resemblance to her daughter is remarkable, and Lenara finds herself staring at the line of her jaw and the shape of her nose, intimately familiar but marked by the signs of age the woman she loved will never gain. Her token, a small silver medal, is set on the top of the pile with a sense of finality.

“Like my daughter, I am not much one for unnecessary words,” she begins, and Lenara’s stomach twists, remembering the warmth in Jadzia’s voice and the way it filled up a room even in whispers, “so I will not take up much more of your time.

“Jadzia was a remarkable woman. Even in her too short life, she accomplished more than many do over the span of decades. I will forever be proud of what she achieved and the person she was. Many of us, myself included, did not see much of her in her final years, and that is something I will always regret. We missed many occasions in her life, including her marriage, in the belief that we would have countless more years to spend with her, when times were less hectic and our lives back to normal. If there is anything Jadzia’s life has shown us, it is that we must always make the best of the time we have, just as she did.”

The words continue, but Lenara doesn’t hear any more. Abruptly, she stands and leaves, walking as fast as she can without running towards the gates of the cemetery. Blinking away her tears, she mentally curses herself for coming.

She will not find what she’s looking for here.

—

Hours later, she returns. The sun is setting, and the mourners are long gone, the neat rows of chairs cleared away. The only indications of what happened that day are the fresh mound of earth and a clean grave marker, not yet marred by time and surrounded by flowers. It reads Jadzia Idaris Dax.

Lenara approaches cautiously, lifting her veil and kneeling down atop the grave, gently touching the marker as though she thought it might break. For a long moment she sat there in silence, a few stray tears dropping to the earth beneath her.

“Hey,” she says, so softly that her words can barely be called a whisper, “it’s me. Lenara. And I’m sorry that I’m too late.

“I thought about coming back from the moment I left. I never stopped wanting to. I would be working through my latest anomaly readings and I would just think, ‘Jadzia would love this’ or ‘I wish I could get Dax to take a second look at these numbers’. Every once and a while I would just get the urge to hop on the nearest transport that would take me to Deep Space Nine, to come back and beg your forgiveness, say I was wrong, turn my back on Trill if it only meant I could be with you. Eventually those urges became more infrequent, but they didn’t go away.

“I was never impulsive the way you were, I can’t just make decisions at the drop of a hat… I thought that maybe I could leave, think it over, and come back if I was sure. But every time I nearly worked up the nerve I backed down. I thought you would reject me for making you wait, or you would have someone else, or you just wouldn’t want me anymore, and I couldn’t make myself take that risk. Once more than a few months of that had passed I figured that I’d lost my chance for good.

“I tried to stop thinking about you. I avoided your papers, or anything that might mention you or the station. I didn’t know you were married, I still don’t know to whom. I didn’t even know if you were still on DS9; part of me hoped that you weren’t, that you had found another posting, something not on the front lines. The only reason I even knew that you were dead was the rumor mill, you know how it is when the Joined die young, especially a symbiont like Dax…”

She pauses, choking down a sob that threatened to rise in her throat.

“I didn’t realize until I heard that part of me was still holding out hope that we could be together. That one day society would change or I would finally be brave enough to come running back to you and we could pick up where we left off. And I realized that I’d lost whatever chance I might have had waiting for that to happen. I’d missed any chance I had to really know you, to learn everything about you, to get all of the time we never had before.

“When I came here, I thought I would be able to learn, that everyone would be able to tell me what I’d missed. I wanted to have that, at the least, to hold on to. But the life you had here isn’t the one you ended up with, and the woman that they knew isn’t the one that I wanted. They had Jadzia, but they didn’t have Dax.

Her voice was rising in volume, racked with the sobs she was trying to suppress. Lenara took deep breaths as she slowly stood, modulating her voice back to a whisper. “I haven’t been able to find out what happened to Dax. I’m assuming that the Symbiosis Committee is keeping everything under wraps while they try to find a suitable host, but there hasn’t been a single word about it. I’m not sure if I’m going to seek them out, whoever they wind up being. I don’t know if it would feel right, to insert myself like that. The two of us meeting was coincidence, maybe fate – chance trying to give us another shot. I don’t think I can recreate that, not intentionally.

“I loved you. As surely as Nilani loved Torias, I loved you. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop regretting the life we could have had, but didn’t. Even if it was just these few years, even if you still would have died, I will always regret getting on that shuttle. I’m sorry that it’s too late for you, Jadzia, but I’m going to figure out who you were. If only for myself.”

Lenara twirls the single flower she’s been holding in her hands, staring at it longingly, before setting it down atop the grave marker. “Goodbye, Jadzia.”

—

The next day, Lenara gets on a transport bound for the other side of the continent, veil fluttering before her face. Curzon Dax had opted for a standard Starfleet burial, his body shot out in a photon torpedo, but his tokens were buried with the rest of his family. The marker is small, lying in the shade of a tall tree, but she kneels beside it anyway and places a flower without saying a word.

She gets on a boat to reach Torias, buried on another continent next to Nilani. His gravesite is familiar, and she remembers Nilani tending to it for the rest of her life after his death. Seeing her own grave is an odd experience, and she lingers by the marker for a long moment before moving on to what she came for. Her memories of the funeral are vivid, and she knows that Nilani’s wedding ring, her token, is buried six feet beneath where she’s standing, placed in a box atop a closed casket because her husband’s body was too mangled and burned to be presentable. She lets the tears fall as she places the flower, but remains silent.

Back on the main continent, Audrid is buried surrounded by her family: her parents, siblings, spouse, and children forming neat rows with identical markers. She reads each name carefully before setting the flower down on Audrid’s grave.

She can’t find any burial record for Emony, and has to do some research to find out that she was cremated, her ashes placed in a vase with her tokens and kept by her descendants. So she goes to the small island where the gymnast grew up and carefully burns the flower, scattering the remains in the sea.

She finds Tobin’s grave in the small town where he spent his later years, his marker bearing a line of poetry. She smiles when she recognizes it, the banned works of an exiled Cardassian. She wonders what the story behind that was as she places the flower.

Lela brings her back to the beginning, buried in the same cemetery as Jadzia. Her grave is at the top of a hill, next to that of her wife, the two markers so close that they’re nearly touching. Lenara places the flower and then stares for a moment, trying to slot this last piece of her lover into place. Lela’s grave is old and worn, the edges rounded and the words slightly faded, and for just a second it makes her doubt the handful of days she had, how much they could have meant in a life as long as Dax’s. But she shakes her head and walks away. She’s gotten what she came here for.

The rest, she cannot find on Trill.

—

It takes a while to find someone willing to take her where she wants to go. There aren’t many passenger vessels going into an active war zone, and none of the Starfleet ships will take on a lone civilian with no good reason to be there.

In the end, she winds up taking a shuttle from Trill to Andor, transferring there to a cargo vessel bound for the Bajoran system. The captain, a Kdarian woman with a kind but tired face, doesn’t ask her to remove the veil, but does ask where she’s going.

“Deep Space Nine,” Lenara answers honestly.

“Any particular reason? Not many people vying to get to the front lines these days.”

Lenara pauses. She considers lying, coming up with an excuse. But in the end, she just says, “I’m looking for someone.”

She figures that it’s technically the truth.


End file.
